Buffett on CNBC: Dimon Should Remain Chairman at J.P. Morgan

Warren Buffett said on CNBC Monday that Jamie Dimon should remain both chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and said that all the members of the bank’s board of directors should keep their jobs.

Buffett, who serves as chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has long praised Dimon. He has said he owns shares of the bank in his personal account, though Berkshire doesn’t own the stock.

His latest declaration of support for Dimon came after investor-advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services last week backed a proposal to separate the chairman and chief executive roles at the bank and said three directors shouldn’t be re-elected.

The directors, David Cote, James Crown and Ellen Flutter, were responsible for “material failures of stewardship and risk oversight” because of the massive London Whale losses, ISS wrote.

Of the board members, Buffett said that their primary responsibility was making sure they have the right CEO running the company.

“If you’re the director of a company like J.P. Morgan, you can not know the details of what’s going on with trading,” he said on CNBC. “I think they’ve got the right CEO,” so they have done their job.

He added that Dimon should retain both the CEO and chairman posts, but he said he wasn’t opposed in principle to separating the two roles at some companies.

“Either system is OK,” he said. One advantage to separating the roles “is that it becomes easier to change the CEO if you have the wrong person in the job.”

Buffett was appearing on CNBC after hosting tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders in Omaha over the weekend. In response to a separate question, he said that Berkshire’s housing-related businesses are benefiting as U.S. housing demand is coming back stronger than it was a year ago.